ANALYSIS: Manning damage short of US fears

Reuters, WASHINGTON

Accused of the nation’s biggest-ever security leak, US soldier Bradley Manning was vilified by the government, saying he caused irreparable damage to US national interests. In retrospect, whatever harm he caused seems to have been overplayed.

A US military judge cleared Manning on Tuesday of the most serious charge against him — aiding the enemy — in a verdict that indicated that the soldier’s secrecy violations, while criminal, were not as dire as prosecutors had alleged.

Manning’s revelations to WikiLeaks, including hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables and raw intelligence reports from the Iraqi and Afghan battlefields, violated his military oath and “put real lives and real careers at risk,” former US Department of State spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

However, the strategic damage to the US — to its reputation and its ability to work with allies and conduct diplomacy — “was transitory,” said Crowley, who resigned in 2011 after publicly criticizing the Pentagon’s treatment of Manning in a military prison.

As reams of classified State Department cables — some containing unflattering portraits of foreign leaders or detailing US envoys’ contacts with human rights groups — leaked to the public, some saw catastrophe for US diplomacy.

Yet, despite what Crowley called a few “isolated cases” in which foreign counterparts were less candid than in the past, fearing their words might leak, the State Department was able to mitigate the damage.

In just one of dozens of examples, US ties with Indonesia wobbled after the release of cables showing the US embassy suspected collusion between Jakarta’s security forces and the extremist Islamic Defenders Front, accused of attacks on religious minorities.

However, “our relations with the US have continued normally since. The lesson is that we have to be more careful with the flow of such intelligence,” he said.

The military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, found Manning guilty on 19 counts, including five espionage charges. Manning could face a sentence of 136 years in prison.

Military prosecutors had pushed for a harsher judgement.

They called him a “traitor” and said his actions had helped the al-Qaeda network.

“The official damage assessments concerning Manning/WikiLeaks have not been publicly released, but my sense is that the bulk of the damage is subtle rather than catastrophic,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group.

“But it is nonetheless real,” Aftergood said. “Because of the broad scope and overwhelming volume of the WikiLeaks cables, their disclosure cast doubt on the ability of the US government to guarantee confidentiality of any kind — whether in diplomacy, military operations or intelligence. That’s not a small thing.”

In Australia, a crucial US ally in the Asia-Pacific region, the revelations have affected the way Western diplomats operate and report on political developments, and have curtailed events such as social dinner party chats where diplomats often gain insights on what is happening in a country.

“The diplomats have told me this has affected their reporting of events in Australia, or events anywhere in the world,” said Member of Parliament Michael Danby, who until June was head of Australia’s powerful joint intelligence committee, which oversees intelligence matters. “It has restricted political reporting and mingling for open Western societies [among diplomats and politicians].”